I’m setting up a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions to build and deploy a Dockerized application to an Ubuntu server. My workflow file looks like this:

name: Build and Deploy to Ubuntu Server

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Docker Buildx
        uses: docker/[email protected]

      - name: Log in to Docker Hub
        uses: docker/[email protected]
        with:
          username: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_LOGIN }}
          password: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_PASSWORD }}

      - name: Build and push Docker image
        uses: docker/[email protected]
        with:
          push: true
          tags: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_LOGIN }}/my-project:latest

  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to Server
        uses: appleboy/[email protected]
        with:
          host: ${{ secrets.SERVER_IP }}
          username: ${{ secrets.SERVER_USER }}
          key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}
          script: |
            docker pull ${{ secrets.DOCKER_LOGIN }}/my-project:latest
            docker-compose -f docker-compose.production.yml down --remove-orphans
            docker-compose -f docker-compose.production.yml up -d
            sudo systemctl reload nginx || echo "Failed to reload Nginx. May require manual intervention."

The build job runs successfully, and the Docker image is built and pushed to Docker Hub. However, during the deploy job, I encounter the following error:

err: stat /home/***/docker-compose.production.yml: no such file or directory

The relevant part of the script in the deploy job is:

docker pull ${{ secrets.DOCKER_LOGIN }}/my-project:latest
docker-compose -f docker-compose.production.yml down --remove-orphans
docker-compose -f docker-compose.production.yml up -d
sudo systemctl reload nginx || echo "Failed to reload Nginx. May require manual intervention."

Why is the workflow searching for the docker-compose.production.yml file on the server’s file system when the Docker image already contains the file? When I run docker pull, the image includes the following files:

> docker run -it --rm {username}/my-project /bin/bash
> ls -R

File listed as:

Dockerfile  
docker-compose.development.yml  
docker-compose.production.yml  
main.py  
requirements.txt

Why doesn’t it automatically use the docker-compose.production.yml file from the Docker image, and what should I add to the GitHub Actions workflow to make this work as expected?